On a table full of wires and cords rubbing every inch of her bare skin, Nazgul Qureishi wondered if spending time with a coworker naked was haram if they didn’t touch. Hashish at two in the morning arouses the important questions. Her fellow developer Daniel Hayek was a chaste distance away from her, similarly nude and leaning against a row of bulky computer boxes and weaving halos of pungent smoke in the air with a marble-patterned pipe.
“So, like, I've been thinking of the Cascade and how it killed the Internet and the satellites. Do you ever do that?" Daniel was rambling to no one in particular, and he kept talking even though Naz hadn’t answered his question. “I do that a lot when I’m high. How much stuff do you think survived?”
Naz’s body shared space with game peripherals, A/V cords, the dismantled carcass of a Nintendo 64 and a bunch of cartridges of The Wild Hunt. It wasn’t her first time sleeping where she worked. In the past few months alone she’d probably ended more nights in the Dev Room than her own apartment. The expectation that you worked as hard as you needed to make sure your game shipped on time. A utility closet tucked behind a vintage Panasonic TV on a cart was reserved for her clothing and toiletries for just this occasion. I slept in worse places in Herat and Karachi. Perhaps that was her true evolutionary advantage in America.
Her ‘advisor’ and Systems Architect Qazi Ibrahim Khan was always annoyed when she’d do this, but he was even more annoyed when she wasn’t working fast enough. She picked her poison. I personally vouched for you, Naz, he’d said. If you embarrass me, do not be somewhere I can find you, he’d said.
“Okay, so let’s game this out.” Daniel paused to cough, and Naz took the opportunity to wordlessly beckon him for the pipe with an outstretched hand. He placed it in her hand with his fingertips, making sure to not touch her palm, and she delicately brought the glass to her mouth and took a drag while Daniel continued to speak. “They think the Cascade started August 23, 2022 right? That’s where they narrowed it down? Boom, 90% of anything more advanced than a vacuum cleaner gets fired. Boom, every server, data center, the whole damn internet turns into copper and silicon scrap. Boom, the satellites crash into each other and the whole damn atmosphere gets shaved clean of any metal larger than a freaking peanut. Then things go crazy for a bit while the governments are still getting their shit together. You’re following me, right?” Nax took another drag and nodded in acknowledgement. You would have to be high to call the dark years ‘a bit’. We still don’t know who or how many people actually died then.
Daniel Hayek was one of her few true acquaintances at Acherontia Arts. Much of the time she knew him they'd shared a mostly professional rapport. Then, when the owner allowed Qazi to informally let her lead The Wild Hunt, he was surprisingly angry that she’d only be credited as a senior developer. It was the first time in a while someone had felt something about something she’d done in a while (with Qazi it was mostly anger, contempt, or indifference). He continued to surprise her in similarly small ways like bringing her lunch and asking how she was.
She extended her hand again and he plucked the pipe from her long thin fingers, again taking care not to touch her. “I was lucky, like, lived near a National Guard Base so we got shit up and running. Still don’t know what happened to most of my friends from SCP and Counterstrike. Couple managed to find my number and call me…” He drifted off, then took another heady gulp of hashish fumes. His voice returned to him in force, “I really thought we’d get Facebook again by now.” He turned and looked at her thigh tattoo, “When are you gonna tell me what the Arabic says there? I don’t speak Dari.”
Things had got less professional a few hours ago. It had been a few weeks since her game launched when Daniel ran into the Dev Room with the leaked retail data—the game was a bonafide hit—and a basket of hashish and non-alcoholic beer. “You have literally no excuse not to celebrate right now.” She shrieked at the news, and impulsively said yes to hanging out and the hashish, the first she’d had in at least a decade. Why not? Who’d care? The knowledge Qazi had absolutely no reason to jump down her throat now was a weight off her chest. The euphoria from the relief matched that of knowing she’d succeeded.
Now the smoke seemed to dance with Daniel’s curly, bottle blonde hair. Everything felt lurid and luminescent. She thought for a moment, briefly turned her face towards him. “I’ll tell you when you’re older,” she said. He was actually older than her.
Two hours ago, when they’d gotten properly high, he blurted out how fun it would be if they both took their clothes off. Her pants were off before he could finish claiming it was a joke, and the way his voice died in his throat and his eyes locked onto her thigh tattoo and up, down, and all around made her go all the way, and he wasted no time joining her there. “We don’t touch, ever, not with my shirt off.” She’d told him. “I’m serious.” She’d gotten high in her teens but never had the money or dealer to indulge since she’d slummed it in Karachi. She liked being high. While high, she was curvy instead of fat. Instead of being Qazi’s welfare case, she was his lucky find. When she was a teenager, instead of being someone’s future wife, she was sleeping with her future husband.
Do not want to hurt his feelings. "Just thinking how I'd barely even heard about any of those games until after the Cascade. I mean two years ago." Actually, she had heard of them. Her village in Herat was somewhat remote but remote did not mean ‘under a rock.' They had Internet cafés until the Taliban came back.
Daniel had taken time to process this. "I didn't know you're Afghan. I figured you were Iranian."
"I am from Afghanistan, yes." Whether he picked up on it or not, she was a Hazara nationalist, moot issue or no.
"Uh, do you have relatives there… you know…" Daniel pulled himself up and sat in a chair to face her. She raised an eyebrow. This was not an energy she was prepared for.
Naz kept her voice pleasant, breathy, neutral, "I know about as much about them as we know anything about Central Asia right now." Then, before he could inquire any further, she rerailed the conversation. "I've only ever played consoles sixth generation and earlier."
“Damn, so you don't actually miss the lost decades, do you?" That is a bit of a leap, Daniel. "Like, the Persona games, Shadow of the Colossus, HD Grand Theft Auto, Halo, the later open world Zeldas."
"You could say I missed the Lost Decades, yes." She did not wish to think of lost things—no amount of weed could soften the way her chest hurt when her mind went there. She felt sticky, sweaty, tight in her own skin. "Could I borrow your shirt?" she asked.
Daniel threw his shirt toward Naz's waiting hand and before he could ask her why, she used it to wipe her face. "Bro," he laughed. "Bro. I love it when you get out of pocket. You're such a people pleaser usually. I don't mean that in a bad way." He added, as she narrowed her eyes at him.
She sighed, turned towards him and clung his shirt to her chest like it was her blanket. "I don't know what you're talking about." She did know, but she preferred to think of it as appeasement, not pleasing. The difference was intentionality.
But what they had been doing up to that moment was neither. Naz felt that unfamiliar energy again, saw the way his expression grew waxy and content, like he was lost and okay with it.
They were both naked, in a room no one was gonna walk in on. What is going on here?
Having taken her inventory, Naz decided to try something random of her own. "You know,” she put a finger to her lips contemplatively, "Don't tell Qazi this, but he's a bit of a jerk isn't he?"
"Oh yeah?" Daniel eyes flicked towards something on her face, “Oh yeah.” He grinned.
“Gimme that pipe," she said.
His hand seemed to shake as he reached it towards her. "I think Qazi isn't seeing the best of you."
"And what," her hand paused on his, “Would that be?" Naz stopped smiling, "Why don't you tell me?"
How long has it been since I've looked at my pager?
"Oh…oh no." She scrambled off the table and grabbed her slacks, underwear, Jersey and blazer. "No!" Not blaspheming nor swearing seriously limits my ability to panic, the stoned voice in her head mused, but the much louder one simply screamed, one that often sounded like Qazi. “What is wrong with me?” How did I not realize it wasn’t on me since ten PM?
She almost clipped the door frame with her shoulder, and kicked a ‘do not run slippery surfaces’ sign into someone’s cubicle by accident. Her bare feet made hollow drumming sounds against the green company carpet tiles in her run, pausing only to pull on her underwear and slacks before scrambling into her office and plucking her pager from the ashtray where she’d left it.
The backlog was an avant-garde poem of frustrated urgency:
1:55 AM. Page: CALL ME ON PAYPHONE.
1:45 AM CALL ME ON PAYPHONE.
1:30 AM CALL ME ON PAYPHONE.
Ditto 23:53 23:00, 22:00—All from Qazi Ibrahim Khan.
"No!" It’s urgent! It’s serious! I’m late! She slid her finger into her mouth and bit down hard on her first knuckle. The piercing ache of her teeth radiated out through her nerves like a soothing warmth and the wrenching in her chest seemed to melt.
"I don't see why you're so afraid of him," Daniel had followed her to her office and she tried to smile and not show Daniel how much him standing there in a tank top and his jeans made her feel cornered. “He’s not even a direct report!”
“It’s not him,” she tried to sound convincing. “It’s my cat sitter—”
“You have a cat?”
I have a cat. “Yeah, I have a cat. Poor baby’s been alone past twenty-four hours.”
“What’s his name?”
“I've got to go," she said, scooping her pager into her purse and swinging it over her shoulder. "Oh, okay," he still looked confused. She felt the energy turn cautious, unsafe, and questioning. She needed to de-escalate and distract him with a pleasant segue.
I want his number. "Could I get your number? Uh—" Her lips moved wordlessly as she tried to process what she’d just said. I want his number?
Daniel looked at her, blinking, tripping over his syllables a few times before he managed a weak "Sure." He moved towards the door, “I forgot my address book in my coat—”
She grabbed his elbow before he could clear the doorway. “Just say it, I got a good memory," Haven’t touched a guy like that since I came to this country. Her nerves wanted her to relinquish her grip, and she fought the impulse, though she loosened her grip so her touch pressed rather than captured. She felt his arm relax like a moored ship in a current. He rattled the numbers off. She repeated them back to him to show she had them down.
It was like she could feel her blood swell her veins, heard the sound of his breathing in a stupor he seemed to share because he also said and did nothing but stare at her. She made herself smile and he nodded. "See you…soon?"
She couldn’t think of something in English that didn’t sound fake or forced and said something in Hazaragi instead.
“What was that?”
“Proverb from where I come from. It means ‘What is written cannot be erased.’”
“But you didn’t write my number down.”
“Oh. Yeah.” She ran her hand through her hair, sighing. “Embrace the mystery, I guess?”
There was a brief moment when they almost hugged and then awkwardly shook hands, and then she bolted past him down three flights of stairs and two blocks to the nearest phone booth. The haze of Daniel’s hashish lingered in her brain, and what was five minutes in the barely lit twilight felt like fifteen.
When she reached the phone-booth she all but ripped the sliding door off its frame in her haste to get inside of it. She steadied her breathing so Qazi would not yell at her for panicking or running in public or god knows what, the stated rationale did not matter. He was offended by irregularity of any kind. The quarter almost skipped from her trembling fingers as she tossed it into the slot. She punched in the numbers to Qazi’s residence, praying he wasn’t asleep. More agonizing than Qazi yelling at her was Qazi making her wait eight hours for him to yell at her.
As the dial tone buzzed in her ears, she felt as though the sound wrapped fingers around her heart, squeezed tight, and began to yank.
“Hello, yes?” Qazi’s gravelly, baritone voice was a nerve-scratching growl over the receiver. “Nazgul, yes?”
“It’s me,” she said. There was a pause. “What’s wrong?” There was a click as the police wiretap activated.
“Nothing.” Qazi was measuring his words out by the thimbleful it seemed. “I do wish to speak with you.”
“We’re speaking now!”
“In person. Where are you?”
“The seaport.”
“The seaport? You mean to tell me you are still in the office?”
“Yes.”
“What’s the point? Your game is out there! Do you think this is 2010? We cannot patch console games! If there are bugs, you should have caught them a month ago. Get some rest. You’re no use to me strung out!”
“You called me out here at two in the morning.”
“I paged you at ten at night. Wait, you were in the office but nowhere near your pager?”
“Qazi.”
“South Street Diner. 24/7 place. I will wait.”
“Where—what is that?”
Click.
Nazgul sighed, reached for the phone book, another quarter, and called the diner’s phone number. “Hello? Yes. Could you give me directions to your establishment? Where am I?”
The tired voice at the other end of the line spewed a litany of directions using landmarks Naz wasn’t too familiar with. She’d get a taxi. Two years in America. I still don’t know this city at all.
…
South Street Diner’s aged and derelict interior was aesthetically untouched by the Cascade, since the decade it hearkened to would never die as completely as the ‘10s and ‘20s did. Grayscale photographs of celebrity patrons still grinned from corkboard walls. Garish pink neon lighting painted the tacky yellow and blue tables. The scent and sound of sizzling bacon crowded out the cheap domestic knock-off cologne and smoky, slightly chemical aroma of liquor breath amidst the rowdy patrons, many in between bars or languishing after evening shifts.
Amidst the diner's aural and olfactory junkyard, her neat and severe director stood out in fresh, creaseless evening clothing, a beige button-down shirt with rolled up sleeves. He sat in a booth sipping his tea while staring straight ahead into space, and Naz couldn’t tell whether he was meditating, calculating, or just fuming. Somehow, even his eyepatch looked focused.
He had a very distinctive appearance: distinguished gray hair, high cheekbones, a weathered olive complexion, and a sharp, broken-off-center nose. There was a hawk. He was only an inch taller than Naz, but she always felt much shorter than him, especially when he was angry with her. His hands were steepled in front of his face, and that he was missing his pinky finger somehow gave him an even more terrifying impression than if he had been whole. She had to sometimes remind herself this man made games often played by children for a living.
Qazi dignified her presence with a nod and a “Good morning,” then gestured to the seat opposite his. Naz forced the tremble from her body as she sat down. Qazi seemed to take great offense to the idea that Naz could be afraid of him.
“Good…evening, Qazi.”
“Good evening, Nazgul.”
Qazi’s nose wrinkled. “What…what is that smell?”
“I did come here in a rush.” She swallowed.
“No, not the sweat, and that was a rhetorical question.” He leaned back in his chair with an incredulous frown. “Or were you under the impression I spent three decades of my life all over the Muslim world without knowing what hashish smells like?”
“Um…”
“Were you smoking Acherontia Arts’ headquarters?”
“Well…” A waitress dropped by their table, and Naz locked eyes with her, looking for something to do that was not absorbing Qazi’s ennui or irritation. “I think we’re ready to—”
“I need another few minutes.” Qazi barked without breaking his eye contact with Naz, and the waitress hurried away. Towards Naz, he wrinkled his nose and cocked his head quizzically, like a pensive barn owl. Finally, closing his eyes, he sighed. “Irrelevant.”
He leaned in towards her and whispered: “From this point on until I leave, we speak Hazaragi only.” Qazi paused until Naz nodded, then continued, “Nan namak khordim. We shared bread and salt. This stays locked in your soul.”
“Y-yes, Qazi.” There was a pause. “Is this about my performance directing Wild Hunt?”
Qazi shook his head. “I had no cause for disappointment.” This was as close to a ‘Good job’ as he would ever give her. “If anything, this regards another’s defects, their…degeneracy.” Qazi’s voice was soft and loud at the same time, a cold hiss through pale thin lips.
“Qazi, for the love of God, what are we talking about here?”
“Robert is selling the company.”
Naz started laughing. She didn’t mean to, but the comic timing, the deadpan was impeccable. Qazi had said something so ridiculous, but so severely.
Then she saw Qazi’s raised eyebrow, remembered who she was sitting with, slapped her hands over her mouth, took a breath. It’s a joke, clearly. “No, he’s not.”
“Yes, he is.” Qazi’s voice sounded less icy now. He let his hands fall to the table.
“No, he’s not, because this was what he said we needed, he said he needed the company to survive. He wouldn’t save something just to give it away!”
“Nazgul jan,” Qazi whispered, and Naz stilled her tongue. He’d never, ever used that term of endearment before. It made everything so much more uncomfortable, like she was being given a terminal diagnosis. “Listen to me. You did well. Anankosoft got an early copy of the game, and it raised their offer price.”
“Raised their offer price?” Naz said. “As in, there had been an offer price?”
“The entire time. Robert wanted to sell out the entire time.” Qazi spat out the last few words like he could taste the very notion and wanted it out of his mouth.
“He said he’d promote me. He said…you both said you needed me.”
“I warned you.” Qazi tilted his head. “I said don’t listen to his promises, to only do this if you wanted to make your mark.”
“I didn’t think he’d promote me.” She ran her hands through her hair, her neck feeling tight. “But I thought you’d…I thought it would matter, Qazi.”
“It does, but only to me. You must think of yourself now, not Acherontia.”
Naz did, and the facts alarmed her. “Qazi, I’m not the director of the project.”
“I know.”
“It’s Doug Jackson’s name on the credits, not mine! I have nothing! They have no reason to keep me over someone else!”
“I know.”
“He was in a hospital while I ran his project for him! I don't even have a diploma, Qazi, this job is all I have on my CV—”
“I’m sorry.” Qazi turned his attention to some invisible point on the table. “I’ll do my best to vouch for you—”
“Your best? I could lose my job, my visa! Do you know how fast they deport people without a visa over here? Qazi, don’t you care?”
“Bas ko.” Qazi snapped, and Naz shut her mouth with a click. “I gave you insider knowledge. I endangered my own reputation in the process. I gave you your job. I gave you your visa.” Qazi got to his feet. “I gave you an education. An opportunity. I lifted you up. I gave you legs so you could walk. Do not expect me to carry you, too. I owe you nothing.” He grabbed his coat and slid a fifty-dollar note on the table. “For the taxi. Sit. Eat some food. Dry your eyes. I’ll see you on Monday.” He paused to stare at her, and she felt like a patient under his scalpel. Then he turned away, muttering something she only caught in passing before exiting, slamming the restaurant door shut behind him. She realized what he’d said: “Tabrik.” Congratulations.
Her eyes dried, but only after she pulled a butterknife from his side of the table and squeezed the jagged end until just before she knew it would leave a mark. Life had shown that her brain was overwhelmed by different kinds of pain, and often she’d use the one to drown out another. “Ma’am,” she called the waitress over, “what is your favorite dish here?” I hate everything on this menu.